Minchung Sinmun [newspaper]

Minchung Sinmun (sometimes spelled Minjoong Shinmoon) was published in Toronto from 1979 to 1993. According to the Encyclopedia of Canada’s Peoples, "In the mid-1960s there were only about a hundred Koreans in Toronto. Thirty years later, forty thousand lived in Ontario, the majority in the metropolitan Toronto area." Minchung Sinmun served this booming community with news of Korea. A central concern for new Korean immigrants to Canada was to learn at least one official language, and this was reflected in the newspaper’s decision to publish English-language pages in most issues. These pages also were a bridge to younger immigrants who attended school in Canada and found reading English more comfortable than reading Korean; younger Korean-Canadians also contributed many of the English-language articles, essay and poems. The paper was widely read but viewed with some ambivalence by local Korean-Canadians. The publisher’s allegiance to a socialist opposition party in Korea, and his stated support of reunification with North Korea, eventually led to an advertising boycott which briefly threatened the newspaper’s existence. The newspaper’s title means "the people’s paper."